Dead Nation was made by Housemarque games and I was the lead programmer in the project. The game was released in december 2010 and it’s availabe in the PSN store. The game was also available by the Sony game giveaway in the summer of 2011 (as a “welcome back gift” after the PSN got hacked and Sony had to rebuild it). As such, it has spread to quite a big player base.

I was mostly responsible for the gameplay side in Dead Nation. All of the gameplay code is run in parallel in the SPUs of the PS3. This allowed us to bump up the amount of dynamic objects we could have. As such, we can have 144 animating, moving and reacting characters on the screen as well as hundreds of simpler objects (meat pieces, grenades, lamps etc). The physics part was accomplished by Havok (which also utilizes the SPUs quite well).

I wasn’t part of the rendering coding team, but graphics wise everything in the game is lit dynamically. This means there is a combination of multiple shadow casting lights, screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) and volumetric effects. This gives the world a uniform feeling, as there are so many dynamic objects in the screen at once.

Screenshots:

These are scaled down screenshots, click on the images to open up a more detailed view, then click on the image again to see it in raw HD resolution.